


high in the mountains

by blink_fahrenheit



Category: Mulan (1998)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Drama, Gen, War is hell, no death but an awful lot of reflecting on death, this author apparently cannot distinguish disney's mulan from saving private ryan, what am i even doing this was a kids movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 11:13:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9437549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blink_fahrenheit/pseuds/blink_fahrenheit
Summary: High in the mountains, where the air was even colder than the dawning knowledge that the young can and will be allowed to die, Li Shang was not a captain. He was not a soldier. He was a boy again, and he wanted to go home.(I am so sorry, this is an old story and I've been on a roll lately so I edited it up and felt like posting it- apparently I am a one-trick pony, and my one trick is reflecting on emotional impact of war on human relationships. This is literally just an introspection on Shang's character and how he reacts to Ping nearly dying.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Look the fighting between Imperial China and the Huns was Grade-A Super Fucked Up, like villagers routinely jumping off towers to spare themselves what would happen when the Huns rolled in kind of fucked up, and we see the movie from Mulan's relatively naive perspective, but presumably Shang was in a really different mindset the whole time, y'know?
> 
> When you're a newly minted Captain, training new recruits because the army you're facing is so big and so brutal that you have literally issued a draft to every single family in the most populous country on earth, and all of those new recruits are hot messes with no basic survival skills, much less combat background- you're probably gonna spend some time reconciling with the fact that you're all gonna fucking die, is my thinking here.

High in the mountains, where the air was even colder than the snow that had just swallowed an army, Ping’s eyes drifted shut and Captain Shang’s heart froze in his chest. It had just dawned on him that he was about to lose his first soldier.

Chien Po rushed forth to lift Ping’s head off the icy ground and moved to undo his neckerchief, probably planning to use it to slow the bleeding. They were friends now, Shang recalled. Ling’s whole little gang had taken Ping in somewhere along the line, after he’d proven himself willing to work himself nearly to death every day keeping up with men twice his age and three times his size. Privately, Shang had been glad to see Ping with friends. He’d hoped that being more integrated into the group would keep the boy alive. Now it seemed like a stupid idea to have harbored. Shang waved Chien Po’s neckerchief vaguely aside and unfastened his own cape instead. Blades and cannons don’t care if their targets are beloved or reviled. They all bleed just the same.

His hands folded the fabric of his cape quickly and mechanically into a rough pad and handed it off to Chien Po. Chien Po blinked, surprised at his captain’s sudden disregard for uniform, but took what was offered and tucked it under the plates of Ping’s armor. The red looked like blood.

Shang looked up and around at his surroundings, succeeding only in encouraging the ice in his heart to spread. He could see Yao and Ling’s backs moving towards the horizon as fast as the snow and their armor would allow, but nobody knew where their medic had ended up in the chaos of the avalanche. And they were miles away from a proper doctor. Miles away from anyone who knew how to take a dying person and make them _stop dying_. Few resources were available to them, to Ping, and hope was not among them.

Shang knew he shouldn’t be surprised.  He should be on his feet, ordering his troops to make camp, clapping them on the shoulders and reminding them that this was _army_ , damn it, and people got hurt. He should be dispersing the onlookers, moving Ping to a tent to await- _something_ , and moving on. But instead he was still on his knees, paralyzed by the chill that had nothing to do with the ice digging into his shins, transfixed by the way Ping’s blood was staining the snow. Watching Ping’s chest rise and fall, wondering how long it would take for it to stop. Wondering whether it would be the blood loss, shock or exposure that finished the boy off.

Shang had known from the beginning that some of these men were going to die. They had joined the army, and armies fought wars. They had all accepted this possibility when they accepted their orders. These soldiers in particular were freshly trained recruits, unfamiliar with combat, marching off to meet the most dangerous army China had ever faced. Shang had said they were ready, and they were. But being ready to face combat was a very different thing from being ready to win a battle without losing a single man. He’d known this was coming. They all had. 

But.

 It shouldn’t have been Ping. It should have been someone else, someone older, someone without a family waiting. Ping wasn’t even supposed to _be_ here. Shang didn’t know who the boy thought he was fooling, but he didn’t believe for a second that the renowned Fa Zhou had actually sent this uncoordinated runt, who had clearly never held a sword before, out to fight the Huns. It would be nothing short of a death sentence. For heaven’s sake, Ping’s voice hadn’t even changed. And despite his insistence on shaving, all of the troops knew he couldn’t grow a beard. At the oldest, Shang figured Ping was around sixteen years old, but more likely fifteen. He’d probably stolen his father’s orders and ridden off without permission, either to protect his aging father or prove himself a man. If he’d done it to prove himself, he’d certainly done so. But if it was for his father’s sake, Shang suspected that Fa Zhou would have preferred a painful death to this.

Fa Zhou would have to be informed if Ping died. Oh, by his father’s soul, Shang didn’t want to write that letter. What would he even say?

 _Honorable Sir, I regret to inform you-_ that Ping would be remembered as a war hero, which would surely come as a great comfort to his parents that would never see their son fully grown? That since the Huns had appeared, boys of sixteen had become acceptable cannon fodder because if they were even one man short of what was necessary they were all better off dead anyway? That good men were dying of hunger and infection and exposure all over the country, and they were the lucky ones because they got to duck out before they were thrown into combat, and that really they should all be glad that Ping had only been stabbed and not subjected to one of the more sadistic deaths that the Huns were so fond of? _Honorable Sir, I regret to inform you that your son has died._

No, Shang could not write that letter. He’d tried to send Ping home specifically to avoid having to write that letter. Shang wasn’t his father. He couldn’t just keep barking orders while young men with long lives ahead of them dropped dead in front of him as easily as a child’s toy soldiers. He couldn’t write his condolences to grieving families on uniform military stationary and then keep marching. He couldn’t pretend that Ping’s pale, still form in the snow didn’t make him want to scream himself hoarse and pound his rage and terror and despair into the ground with his bare hands until they broke.

 High in the mountains, where the air was even colder than the dawning knowledge that the young can and will be allowed to die, Li Shang was not a captain. He was not a soldier. He was a boy again, and he wanted to go home.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't worry it's okay, Ping/Mulan is fine, the Disney movie plot picks up from here, I just wanted to explore Shang's inner world a little bit.


End file.
